Language

Interview

Seven questions for K. David Harrison

BY SOME estimates, half of the world's 7,000 languages will disappear in the next century. K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, has made a career documenting some of them—and advocating for keeping them alive. A film about his exploits (with a fellow linguist, Greg Anderson), "The Linguists", was nominated for an Emmy award, surely a first for that academic discipline. Most recently, Mr Harrison has written a book with National Geographic: "The Last Speakers". We asked him about what is lost when a language dies.

Johnson: What is a "language hotspot", and what are the characteristics of the typical hotspot?

Mr Harrison: "Language hotspot" is a term I coined in 2006, inspired by the biodiversity hotspots model. Languages are unevenly distributed around the globe (both geographically and demographically), and they face uneven threats. The hotspots model helps us to visualise and track this global trend, and to prioritise resources. A language hotspot is a contiguous region which has, first of all, a very high level of language diversity. Secondly, it has high levels of language endangerment. Thirdly, it has relatively low levels of scientific documentation (recordings, dictionaries, grammars, etc.). We've identified two dozen hotspots to date, in places such as Oklahoma, Paraguay, India, Papua New Guinea and Siberia. With a scientific team from National Geographic, we are visiting the hotspots to take the pulse of some of the world's most endangered languages.

The hotspots model yields some surprises: The Oklahoma hotspot has 26 languages belonging to 9 language families. It includes Yuchi (Euchee), an isolate language which may have as few as seven speakers and is now the focus of a community-led revitalisation effort. Bolivia, a country with just under 12 million people, boasts 37 languages belonging to 18 language families. Europe, with 164 languages and 18 language families, has significantly less diversity than Bolivia.

The hotspots model allows us to visualise the complex global distribution of language diversity, to focus research on ares of greatest urgency, and also to predict where we might encounter languages not yet known to science. This was recently borne out by our documentation of Koro, a small language in India that is new to science. (See National Geographic's Enduring Voices project for an interactive map.)

Johnson: What do we lose when we lose a language?

Mr Harrison: The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded. In "When Languages Die" (2007) I wrote "When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday." Only some cultures erect grand built monuments by which we can remember their achievements. But all cultures encode their genius in their languages, stories, and lexicons.

Each language is a unique expression of human creativity. We find millennia of careful observation of the natural world and human behaviour, knowledge of flora and fauna (often not yet known or identified by scientists), and some of the secrets of how to live sustainably in challenging environments like the Arctic or the Andean Altiplano.

We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages—monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands—erode.

Johnson: You describe many words you've found as hard to translate, but then you do translate them all into English. Is anything truly untranslatable?

Mr Harrison: Just as there are no exact synonyms within a language ("big" does not mean precisely the same as "large"), there are no exact matches for words or expressions across languages. I can express the notion "four year old male uncastrated domesticated reindeer" in English. But our tongue lacks the economy of information packaging found in Tofa, a nearly extinct tongue I studied in Siberia. Tofa equips reindeer herders with words like "chary" with the above meaning. Furthermore, that word exists within a multidimensional matrix that defines the four salient (for the Tofa people) parameters of reindeer: age, sex, fertility, and rideability. Words are untranslateable because do not exist in a flat, alphabetised dictionary style list, but rather in a richly structured taxonomy of meaning. They are defined by their oppositions to and similarities to multiple other words—in other words, the cultural backdrop.

As I learned working among the Tuvans, nomadic yak herders of South Siberia, words can also be anchored to a specific place. In Tuvan, in order to say "go" you must first know the direction of the current in the nearby river and your own trajectory relative to it. Tuvan "go" verbs therefore index the landscape in a way that cannot survive displacement or translation. Knowledge systems such as the Tofa reindeer taxonomy and Tuvan "go" verbs get lost, flattened out, and vastly simplified when people switch to speaking another language.

Beyond word meanings, the poetics of song, epic tales, origin myths and everyday stories cannot be translated, or at least not well, without losing expressive power, nuance, and affect.

Johnson:Talking about language and local ecology, you say losing one entails losing the other. If most things are translatable, is it possible to keep the knowledge but not the language?

Mr Harrison: It's possible, but not likely, and it's not the usual case we see everywhere from the Arctic to Amazonia. In indigenous cultures we observe the decline of languages and lifeways occurring in parallel. There's an astonishing book called "Watching Ice and Weather Our Way," co-authored by Yupik elders and scientists. In it, the Yupik elders describe, define and draw sketches of 99 distinct types of sea ice formations which their language gives specific names to.

Their climate science astounds with its precision, predictive power, and depth of observation. Modern climate scientists have much to learn from it. As the Arctic ice melts, and new technologies like snowmobiles advance, Yupik ice-watching becomes the passion of the elderly few. Their knowledge of ice, their words for it, and the hunting skills and lifeways are all receding in tandem with the Yupik language itself.

Johnson: Are their any recent discoveries by linguists among small languages you can single out as a reason for preserving and learning more about them?

Mr Harrison: Linguists often value languages for their instrumental value to science, and while I do not endorse this, there is much to learn about human cognition and the language faculty from small(er) languages. Many discoveries await us, and each language yields new structures and unexpected complexities. But we have a pitifully sparse sample. I and many fellow linguists would estimate that we only have a detailed scientific description of something like 10% to 15% of the world's languages, and for 85% we have no real documentation at all. Thus it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar. If we want to understand universals, we must first know the particulars. So my own work focuses on fine-grained descriptions of how languages work, from phonemes to syntax and beyond. I delight in the tiny olfactory suffix of Tofa which may be added to any noun to mean "smells like x". And I marvel at the vast extended patterns of mnemonic hooks that allow memorisation and recitation of the Tuvan "Boktu-Kirish", an 8,000+ line oral epic.

Johnson: Many of the peoples you describe are, from our point of view, desperately poor. "Development" tends to fold them into the bigger, richer society, but kills their languages. How can the tradeoff be resolved?

Mr Harrison: No one, no matter how poor, becomes richer by abandoning (or being coerced to abandon) one language to learn another, and in fact I suggest they become poorer from it. People of all ages, but especially children, can easily be bilingual. New research shows bilingualism strengthens the brain, by building up what psychologists call the cognitive reserve. In addition, heritage-language retention provides access to the cultural knowledge base and undergirds a strong(er) ethnic identity and cultural pride. It is a pernicious (and false) message of globalisation (often echoed in "development" or national literacy campaigns) that language choice is subtractive, ie, you must abandon your heritage language to speak only a dominant tongue. Around the globe, we see minority speech communities, from Aymara to Zapotec, Aka to Mowhawk, pushing back against this ideology. They are making a strategic decision to keep their languages, while becoming bilingual in a global tongue. We can all contribute to making the world safe for linguistic diversity. It requires a shift in attitudes. If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival. No one knows where the next brilliant idea will emerge; no culture has a monopoly on human genius.

Johnson: Small languages like Welsh and Letzeburgesh survive and even thrive in rich places like Europe. Other languages like Manx and Romansh are dead or threatened. Do rich countries hold any lessons for developing ones?

Mr Harrison: Linguistic vitality (often against great odds) can be found in poor and rich countries, and provides some hope in an otherwise downward extinction trend. We do not know exactly what combination of intangible factors (linguistic pride, attitudes, mentoring) yields success in mother tongue transmission. I've been traveling the globe for a decade to document the struggles and successes of language activists, which I recount in my latest book. I'll close with the inspiring example of Matukar, a language spoken in a small village in Papua New Guinea. Down to about 600 speakers (out of a tribal group of 900+), Matukar is under immense pressure from the national language Tok Pisin and from English. Many of the children no longer speak it. Rudolf Raward, a local leader and language activist, is determined not to let his mother tongue slip away. Working with me under the National Geographic Enduring Voices Project, he devised a written form for what had been until 2010 a purely oral language. Rudolf and his mother Kadagoi Raward patiently recorded thousands of words in their language. Using those recordings, we built a Matukar online talking dictionary. Matukar village recently got electricity, and they expect to have internet within a year. When Matukar children visit the internet for the very first time, they will find their language is spoken there, that it is as suited for technology as any other, that it has a voice that spans the globe. What more powerful message could help to incentivise their continued use of the magnificent Matukar tongue?

If you read the article you should have picked up the fact
that different languages offer different perspectives in how
we view the world. The other point that was made was that
you don't have to give up your first language to learn a second.
Diversity is a biological and ecological necessity. If we fail
to recognize the importance of all languages we loose an important
piece of humanity. Besides, if we don't care about the lesser languages then we should all just switch over to Chinese since that is the language with the most speakers in the world.

I'm studying my third foreign language and with each one I've learned a new way to see things and to describe life, and I've made a lot of new friends along the way. It's a much richer existence to appreciate other cultures and languages than just to expect everyone to be the same. Accomplishments are much higher quality when a variety of perspectives are offered to solve a problem or to improve on something. If everyone is bilingual, then everyone can communicate with someone else. Nothing is lost, and we're all still able to work together just fine.

The majority of these comments seem to be fueled more by fear of diversity than by the appreciation of it. People will always find a reason to discriminate against each other and break up into groups even if they all speak the same language. Any workplace or high school cafeteria is a great example of that. One language doesn't mean we'll all live in harmony.

Very disappointing to see so little support for someone who is trying to help keep carefully designed languages and the knowledge they offer around, but it is to be expected. If everyone appreciated diversity, there wouldn't be the shift toward cookie-cutter Best Western style hotels and Wal-marts in every town across America.

Languages evolved in isolation, which is why PNG has so many; go over the hill and be eaten by the neighbours. Languages are for communicating; the fewer the languages the easier it is to communicate. Maintaining little groups of people with their little languages just for the entertainment of the linguists (living museums) hardly does justice to the people involved who may wish to enter the larger world.

I agree with AcrossTheStreet. The communities have moved on. Trying to drag them back because WE think they should is pointless and counter productive.

A crucial obstacle to language preservation is the assumption that so many people seem to have (including some of the commenters here) that acquiring a new language requires forgetting the old. Languages with millions of speakers have disappeared within a generation because people deliberately avoided transmitting them for reasons of status; they wanted their children to speak the prestige language exclusively instead of their own native tongues. You see the same mentality in immigrants wanting to raise their children to speak only the language of their adopted home and not their heritage languages.

Multilingualism is taken for granted in many parts of the world, but unilingualism reigns in others, particularly where the mere ability to speak some languages will lead to stigmatization as an outsider.

The argument that preserving minority languages impedes their speakers from joining the wider world only makes sense if this unilingual assumption that one can only speak one language at a time is true. But most Finnish speakers, for instance, seem to have enough command of English to permit linguistic access to the wider world without putting their own native language in danger. An unequal comparison for sure, as Finnish is a national language with millions of speakers, but this should make it clear that there is no intrinsic reason that learning majority languages should threaten minority ones, even if virtually every speaker of the minority speaker learns the majority language. Welsh is not in danger of disappearing even though virtually every Welsh speaker speaks English, for instance.

Some people get up early to look at the ice while others sit at home and check their email. Diversity is the key to survival. Speaking several languages is mind expanding while reading at your PC requires no necessary speech. One lifestyle requires few resources, interaction with others and with nature while the other is a dependant, resource sucking, polluting existance. When the lights go out I want to be with those who can read the ice and converse with others.

I'm split on this. I consider myself a philology hobbyist and while there is something to be said about describing ice flows in 99 different ways, there is much more to be said for being able to get a job because you can converse with more than the 200 people in your village.

Is Mr Harrison aware of a phenomenon known as 'borrowing'? If the Tofa reindeer-herders become monolingual in Russian, they will surely keep their specialized vocabulary of reindeer-herding; on the other hand, if they move to the city they will forget the word for 'four-year-old uncastrated male tame reindeer' even if they have a strictly Tofa-speaking enclave with strictly Tofa-speaking schools. Who mourns the lost jargon of obsolete professions?

It has been said that "languages differ not in what they can say but in what they must say." I confess I don't see any compelling virtue in preserving a language just because its word for 'go' must encode the direction of the nearest river.

"Bolivia, a country with just under 12 million people, boasts 37 languages belonging to 18 language families. Europe, with 164 languages and 18 language families, has significantly less diversity than Bolivia."

I used to live in Papua New Guinea. Each "wontok" tribe (one talk) has admirable caring virtues and solidarity. But these tribes have a tradition of fighting -or eating- other tribes. Wontok is isolating. A common language is uniting. Tribal war or a global village???

Why not think that it is a kind of creative destruction and good for the all ? So many beautiful companies go bust with so many good memoirs, experiences and people everyday. Should we get upset about that ? I am not convinced too.

New Zealand's Maori language has been 'rescued' in recent decades by a concerted effort. Though in fact the Maori never were a single group with a single language anyway, as their occupancy of the land was highly tribalised and full of conflict. So the rescue tactic depends on a sort of enforced standardisation into 'Te reo Maori'.

As MarkHarrisonUK points out, a language which evolved to operate in a primitive world (pre-European Maori lived a stone-age life) will not have its own mechanisms or words to describe modern things or concepts, and has to borrow & adapt ready-made items from other languages. I don't know enough about the Maori language to say whether it provides much to linguists in terms of unique concepts, but the latest efforts to revive its use seem to me to be more politically driven than anything else.

Is Matukar realled "as suited for technology as any other", or would it be fairer to say that Matukar is "as unsuited for technology as any other."

After all, a "5 megapixel camera" is something we all understand.

The recipe for cooking the middle word, however, is not entirely English:

1: Take the Latin "elementum", marinade in Old French until it becomes "element", set aside the word in a bowl.

2: Take the Latin "pictura", dress in Italian until the 15th Century, then substitute an "e" for the "a" and transfer into English. Keep warm until the 1920s, then toss lightly in American Magazine culture, until it contracts to "pix"

3: Take the first part of the "Element" (el) you made earlier, and combine with "pix", blend them firmly together until they are fully incorporated into a pixel.

4: Serve with a Greek prefix (mega).

We should also consider the transition that "camera" made from starting out as a Greek vaulted chamber (kamera) becoming a latin vaulted room (camera), before being applied to two different forms of image capture - "camera obscura" (black box with lens), and "camera lucida" (prisms used to capture an image to trace - before dumping the latecomer "obscura" and indeed the "vaulted architecture" to become a picture-taking device.

What is the Matukar for "5 megapixel camera"? I suspect that it will prove to be "5 megapixel camera", having as much claim to the term as English.

How can you stop the dying of languages?.When any language disappear her importance for communication is over.People use language for commutation if any language did not help us for communication that language die, and let them die.Language is medium. If any medium out of date we replace new medium this is a law of nature.

@rv8591: Taking your argument to the extreme, once we have translated all the great works of world literature into Modern English, we can destroy the originals and be no poorer for it. We wouldn't even need Shakespeare in the original, as it was written in an earlier form of English which is no longer suited as a means of communication.

Seeing languages only as means of passing on knowledge is taking an extremely simplistic point of view. Language is not a passive encoding scheme of human knowledge such that you could freely substitute between different languages and expect the content to be unaltered.

Both of my children are in a bilingual school program (English/Korean), and I've recently become more aware of language preservation and the effort to pass endangered languages on to children. The educational needs in both cases are quite similar.

For language preservation, probably the most important change in the last 100 years or so has been the realization that children can learn more than one language in school, and that they may benefit by doing so. Pushy parents now advocate "multilingualism" regardless of heritage, as a core part of intellectual development. It may be a bit of a fad, but the fact remains that schools increasingly have the resources they need to teach non-dominant languages.

Readers of The Economist probably agree with me that a good way to encourage activity is to provide incentives for participating in that activity. If we want more linguists to document and protect endangered languages, then we should provide incentives for people to become professional linguists and to conduct the research needed to understand and preserve endangered languages.

If we want people to keep languages alive, we should provide incentives for them to do so (and perhaps remove disincentives for doing so). Money is a good incentive. Is there a foundation which accepts donations and provides subsidies for people to keep endangered languages alive? I would note that my ancestral language, Irish, is being kept alive in part by non-monetary incentives provided by the Government of Ireland and other governments could provide similar incentives to keep languages alive in their territories.

While I surely oppose efforts to deny individuals their rights to speak the language of their choice, I am also dubious about efforts which would force people to learn endangered languages against their will. Educating people in the official language of a state seems important, but there are significant human rights problems involved in language policy.

@Tamfang
>"Bolivia, a country with just under 12 million people, boasts 37 >languages belonging to 18 language families. Europe, with 164 >languages and 18 language families, has significantly less
>diversity than Bolivia."
>
>Eh? Was something mis-transcribed?

I think there is a phrase missing near the end of the above paragraph. "Europe, with..... 18 language families, AMONG ITS 400+ MILLION PEOPLE, has significantly less...."
Silly to leave out the European population out of that paragraph!

(1) English, (2) Afrikaans, (3) Zulu, (4) Xhosa and seven other indigenous language. Max du Preez, a liberal Afrikaans journalist said that if enough people wish to speak a language it will survive.

The late president Nyerere of Tanzania was responsible for getting the whole of Tanzania to speak Swahili. I believe that there were 25 tribal languages before he "coerced" the country into using/adopting a single language.

Another dying language is Yiddish. The script is Hebrew but the syntax is Germanic. This will eventually die out as the older generation dies out.

Languages are seen with passion by nationalists, traditionalists and, of course, linguists. But in the end languages are a means for communication and communication will be better when we all speak the same language.
I don't subscribe the idea that when we lose a language we lose knowledge, we only lose a mean of communication that is no longer useful. The knowledge of any specific peoples can be safely translated to another language, where it will surely be more easily accessible to the rest of the world.

Classical Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon are no longer spoken, but their descendant forms are flourishing. Modern Greek, the Modern Romance languages, and English represent the latest iterations of a continuous linguistic tradition. If you trace the development of Modern Greek, at no point did its speakers decide no longer to speak 'Classical Greek' and switch to a new language; it was part of a continuous and natural language change. The same for the descendants of Latin and Anglo-Saxon (German, by the way, is on a separate though related branch and is not descended from Anglo-Saxon).

Classical Greek and Latin, were preserved to posterity because they left behind a huge body of literature, and continued to be used in scholarly or ecclesiastical circles long after they ceased to be spoken in this fossilized form. This effort to preserve a more older form of a language is not the same thing as trying to preserve the language itself.

For your analogy to stand, the speakers of Classical Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon would all have had to abandon their original languages and take up a different language, say Albanian, to pick at random. Then, in the modern world, there would be no Modern Greek, no Modern Romance languages, no English. There would only be various descendants of Albanian. Only then would Classical Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon be completely lost to humanity in the way many languages are being lost today.